Corrupting American healthcare

In his article “The Sovietization of Medical Care,” Jeffrey A. Tucker, President of the Brownstone Institute, compares the failures in the old Soviet Union’s “health care” system to America’s politicization of our healthcare system, using the introduction of the COVID virus as the cudgel:

. . . In the US, in nearly every state, regardless of whether the virus was spreading rapidly with significant medical consequences, hospitals were forcibly reserved only for emergencies and Covid patients. Elective surgeries were out of the question, as were cancer screenings or other routine checkups. This left most hospitals in the country with very few patients and a gutting of their profitability models, leading to furloughs of thousands of nurses during a pandemic. 

It also created a situation in which hospitals were desperate for a revenue source. By government legislation, a subsidy was provided to them for Covid patients and Covid deaths, thus incentivizing medical institutions to classify everyone with a positive PCR test as a Covid case, regardless of what else was wrong with the patient. 

This began almost immediately. Here is Deborah Birx speaking to the issue on April 7, 2020. 

[Video clip & tweet:]  Here is Dr. Birx saying that the government is recording anyone who dies withcoronavirus in the United States, regardless of any other health issue, as a death from coronavirus.

This practice continued for two years, leading to a massive confusion about how many people actually died of Covid and skewing all existing data on the case fatality rate.  . . .

Further, doctors all over the country are facing massive pressure to list as many deaths as possible as Covid deaths. 

These programs create a vicious circle. They establish incentives to overstate the danger of Covid. The overstatement provides a justification to continue the state of emergency, which keeps the perverse incentives going. With effective vaccines and treatments widely available, and an infection fatality rate on par with flu, it’s past time to recognize that Covid is no longer an emergency requiring special policies.

. . . The further we move away from health care as essentially a doctor/patient relationship, with freedom of choice on all sides, and the more we allow central plans to replace on-the-ground clinical wisdom, the less it looks like quality health care and the less it contributes to public health. 

The full report is here.  Recommended. 

The website for Dr Simone Gold’s America’s Frontline Doctors no longer comes up in my online searches.  Instead, I find reports advising readers that these doctors were pushing “misinformation” and prescriptions of ineffective and harmful medications, such as ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine (which, in reality, have been very effective in mitigating COVID symptoms).

Dr Gold was imprisoned for showing up at the January 6 “insurrection” in DC.  ABC described her as a “leading anti-vax figure.”  No, she was/is against the mandates and the particular mRNA injection.  If you want to see how blatant censorship and political propaganda corrupts the public discourse, have a look at the Wikipedia page for Dr Gold here.  My take-away:  I would not trust Wikipedia on any topic that has generated controversy.      

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